There
is a trial going on in Germany of three
wretched British army squaddies, who were
encouraged by their officers to vent their
fury on ordinary Iraqis. There are candid
snapshots of sex acts and violence, all
simulated so we are
told.
|
January
21, 2005 (Friday)
London
(England) OUR bank account here is now all
but empty, and the letter which came yesterday was,
as I suspected, from the school about the bill. But
the big reprint of "Nuremberg,
the Last Battle" is now
coming off the presses, the printer tell me today,
and the super new edition of "Apocalypse
1945: the Destruction of
Dresden" follows
next.  Today's
The Daily Telegraph has a contemptuous
headline about George Bush's inauguration
speech yesterday: DEFIANT BUSH DOESN'T MENTION THE
WAR -- a play on a famous Basil Fawlty line. Yes,
the man in the White House is certainly no
Roosevelt. Another paper, lying on a seat in the
bus, also headlines that in his 2,000 word speech
there was no mention of Iraq. It is the elephant in
the drawing room, a colossal and bloody blunder
that history will see no differently.
The whole episode in Iraq is what used to be
called an ego-trip; but it would be an obscenity to
call it that now, given the taking of a hundred
thousand innocent Iraqi lives, justified by one lie
after another, but really based on one black and
sticky premise, spelt out in three letters: o-i-l.
The real test will be if the US troops pull out at
any time soon after the forthcoming "democratic
election". I would not bet on it. Hypocrisy now engulfs
across the world, oozing forth, and sometimes even
gushing, from the lips of Bush the Smirk and Mr
Sanctimonious Blair. The talk of democratic elections in Iraq is a
laugh: how democratic are elections where the most
popular political party, the Ba'ath Party is banned
?-- That is the party of which we wantonly killed
200 leading members, all non-combatants in the eyes
of international law, known to be meeting in Basra,
in a deliberate air attack when the war began.  We
know that the Iraqi citizens of Falluja, which is
now somewhat flatter for having been cleansed by
the Americans (with Tony Blair as a willing
accomplice) have yet to receive their voting
papers, and are unlikely to get them in time, given
that they will now hardly vote for that nice Mr
Iyad Allawi, left, the prime minister and
serial-killer,
who was appointed "by the UN", we are told, but is
in fact still a stooge of his former MI6 and CIA
handlers.
If the Nazis had allowed occupied Norway to vote
for Mr Vidkun Quisling and his stooges, we
would not have called that democratic, and I do not
propose to bestow that graceful word on this
disgraceful forthcoming farce either. 
YES, the hypocrisy. There is a trial going on in
Germany at Osnabrück of three wretched British
army squaddies, who were encouraged by their
officers to vent their fury on ordinary Iraqis.
There are candid snapshots of sex acts and
violence, all simulated so we are told. There is
talk of a British "Abu Ghraib."
 General
Sir Michael Jackson, right, our commander in
chief of the British Army, goes on television,
seemingly after a large lunch -- and who would not
be driven to drink by dancing to Geoff
Hoon's tune? -- and roundly denounces these
crimes: which after two days brings a sharp rebuke
from the judge trying the case, the no less
unfortunately named Michael Hunt, about the
scathing press coverage and passing comments on a
case while it is still in progress.
Unlike in the United States, this is usually
frowned upon in England, though not always. I
remember one
morning, during the trial of my libel action
against Deborah Lipstadt, trying to get
Mr Justice Gray to issue the same rebuke,
particularly to The Guardian, but he
informed us loftily that he was above being
influenced by such coverage, and no doubt he
was. Is this laughable "war crimes trial" in
Osnabrück, this self-inflicted injury, perhaps
just another sop to our friends in the Pentagon:
hey, fellers, we were all doing it, not just your
guys? I am not impressed by this court martial. I
stand back and think: Okay, it may well be an
insult for an Iraqi to have the soles of somebody
else's foot planted on you. But I can think of
worse things. Even at Abu Ghraib, much of the
"torture" appears to have consisted just of large
and ugly dogs being told to yap at the prisoners,
and prisoners being photographed with women's
knickers stuffed on their head, and no doubt there
is word in their Holy Scriptures that forbids other
kinds of adjustment to a gentleman's dress too. This is however unadulterated sophistry: If I
were an Iraqi and given a choice, I would
democratically vote for that kind of humiliation
any day, in preference to being torn to pieces
together with my family by a "coalition" Cruise
missile, or a 2,000 pound "smart" bomb, smashing
into my home at some airborne controller's
behest. One act is a crime, we are told, however, and
the other is not. Sir Mark Thatcher is fined
a quarter of a million pounds in South Africa, for
plotting a regime change in Equatorial Guinea;
George Bush and Tony Blair now pretend that they
invaded Iraq to produce "regime change". One is a
crime, the other is not. I don't get it, and never
will. Get real about these "crimes", that is my advice
to our current leaders; because even if you do not,
one day history will. 
WHICH brings me back to Osnabrück; we hear
much word of that town these days. I have a picture
of Osnabrück, taken on Sept 13, 1944, which
recently crossed my desk as with my left hand, so
to speak, I am digitally scanning my entire
negative archives while I wait for the High Court
to order the government Trustee to return the rest
of my illegally seized files to me. This bombing campaign was one of Britain's more
auspicious war crimes, about which one hears
nothing whatever nowadays, since our friends in the
German government discourage talk about that war --
the bombing war, I mean. I daresay we sent over
around a thousand bombers that day, and dropped
several thousand tons of bombs on this little
German town in 1945; it was a "disproportionate"
act of war, aimed primarily at killing
non-combatants, i.e. the kind which is now
outlawed by definition under the Geneva
conventions. For some reason which escapes me, the British
Army is still in Germany, sixty years later. The
pretexts are now wearing pretty thin, I would have
thought. When Joseph Stalin was alive, we
might have had good reason to be there, and no
doubt the Germans welcomed our presence; but hey,
the old goat died in 1953. Nikita
Khrushchev? Dead. Leonid Brezhnev? Mr
Bush and Mr Blair, here's welcome news for you
both: he's dead as well. And Blair's old idol
Walther Ulbricht too. The Wall has gone. The threat has gone. Those
WMD of yours turned out to be fictitious. So what
in heaven's name are we still doing in Germany? I
know that Berlin is kindly picking up most of the
tab, but couldn't we use those troops somewhere
else right now --  for
instance, to light a firework up the backside of
the IRA? Or -- now here's a thought -- to bring
some relief to our hard pressed kinsfolk that
Margaret Thatcher and her pals abandoned in
Rhodesia and elsewhere? [Previous
Radical's Diary] |
David Irving